Quantified self

Uh, so I started being interested in health stuff.

Um, yeah, actually I was, I was really interested in, uh, do you know Quantified Self or like the personal informatics communities?

Um, maybe.

I...

And that really comes to the fore with the advent of things like self-tracking technologies, right? I mean, you can do that with a bathroom weight scale, but then with something like a GPS enabled watch, heart rate monitor, things that are tracking your sleep and everything else, all these variables that come to be associated with health and wellness are now, you know, quote unquote, under your control, right? And so you have this increased responsibility to look after yourself and take care of these things.

The other thing that happens is Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, these are two former editors of Wired Magazine in, I think, 2007, formally announced and launched the Quantified Self Movement, which is, the motto there is understanding yourself or self-understanding through numbers.

And so the idea that they were promoting was using tech to kind of biohack and, you know, better your lives in some way.

And they were more expansive than sort of physical health and wellness.

I think we're seeing a convergence of multiple things happening all at the same time.

We're seeing the convergence of AI with the emerging model of systems medicine and biology with the quantified self-awareness movement.

with capacity to sort of get large data sets on individuals with, you know, the omics revolution where we look at, you know, very cheap genomes very soon, very full, you know, omics, which gives you so much more data.

You know, the average doctor would do like 20 blood tests.

Then, in the late 2000s, a group of self-tracking enthusiasts started a movement to create and share ways of obsessively collecting data on themselves.

It was called the Quantified Self.

Today, we're exploring the early days of this obscure tech subculture and what changed when tracking went mainstream.

And we'll try to understand whether our mountains of self-track data are actually helpful.

Morgan.

I'll start like you do, by opening a new tab.

The Quantified Self Movement.

We're going back to 2007-2008.

The screenless part is almost symbolic, less staring, more living.

From quantified self to quantified care, and maybe to ambient care where health is just there, like electricity, quiet until it's gone.

Lovely thinking there, actually.

Well, the way that I love to talk about it is saying that every place, every activity or every object that we spend a lot of time with is destined to become a health optimized moment or health optimizing moment even.